Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

Knoxville Business News Tennessee Mountain Scenery Background
October 21, 2021 | Tom Ballard

East TN enterprises honored during this week’s CAMX event

Several East Tennessee enterprises have been honored during “CAMX – The Composites and Advanced Materials Expo 2021” held this week in Dallas.

As previously reported in teknovation.biz, the Society for the Advancement of Materials and Process Engineering (SAMPE) North America announced that Knoxville-based IACMI – The Composites Institute was a winner of the organization’s “2021 Organizational Excellence Award.” The recognition was presented this week to John Hopkins, IACMI President and Chief Executive Officer.

Hopkins accepting award.

“IACMI has set a high standard for innovation and creativity in advancing material and process engineering,” said Jerome Berg, SAMPE President. According to the earlier announcement, the award is made to organizations from industry, academia, and/or government that exemplify the best of SAMPE from within the advanced materials and process community as a whole.

Separately, two IACMI members – Composite Applications Group (CAG) located in McDonald near Chattanooga and Structural Composites Inc. of Melbourne, FL – teamed-up with TrinityRail Group LLC to win the 2021 “Combined Strength CAMX Award” that was also presented at the conference for a project to develop and build a 72-foot refrigerated boxcar floor from composite materials.

The project was described in greater detail in this recent article that published in CompositesWorld. In a social media post, CAG’s Peter Hedger Jr. wrote: “TrinityRail had the vision and drive for innovation and CAG had the tools to make it happen. Jeff McCay pushed for change and Kenneth Huck and Carter Andrews made it happen. Structural Composites and Scott Lewit brought technology that helped lightweight the rail floor while achieving better thermal insulation for the refrigerated rail car.”

Founded in 2015, IACMI has built a strong collaborative ecosystem across the composites community, managing more than 50 collaborative and industry-led technical projects and commercializing more than 15 new products.

IACMI workforce partner Davis Technical College was also named a winner of the award for its Composite Materials Technology program. IACMI is deploying Davis Tech’s training program in select community colleges across the country as part of the Advanced Composites Career Pathways (ACCP) program.


Don’t Miss Out on the Southeast’s Latest Entrepreneurial, Business, & Tech News!

Sign-up to get the Teknovation Newsletter in your inbox each morning!

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.


No, thanks!